For Blue Skies
by Shtuff
Summary: Somehow, he's carrying on. For her. For the blue sky days that remind him he's alive. AU. Sasuke/Hinata.


**Disclaimer: **Naruto belongs to Kishimoto.

**Oh this song. I cannot begin to describe how much this song has moved me and inspired me. You must go listen to it if you haven't before: For Blue Skies by Strays Don't Sleep. **

**And typical, the first thing I write with this pairing is utter angst. I'm going to need so much fluff to make up for this. **

* * *

"**It's been a long year, since we last spoke. How's your halo?"**

**

* * *

**

_**One year after**_

It's easier to breathe. That shouldn't be the first thing he thinks, but it is and it's true, and so he lets it hang in the air around him with the steam spilling from his lips—a silent admission that is heavy against his shoulders and cold against his skin, but somehow comforting.

The lead that's been crushing his chest, steadily grinding his ribs and his heart and his lungs into ash and dust, is lighter—not gone, never, ever gone because that would mean _forgetting, _but bearable, at least.

It's ironic and ridiculous: he survives the murder of his family, the betrayal of the one person in the world he wouldn't have minded becoming one day, and it's _her _death that shatters him like glass into so many thousands of shards he doesn't think he'll ever find all the pieces.

But it's easier to breathe.

Maybe that means something, and he's always been too good at introspection—at losing himself in the dark spaces and blood-soaked corners of his own mind—so he pulls away from the thought to the flowers in his hands. Lilacs, because roses are too cliché and sentimental and _final, _and she'd always looked good in purple. He shifts them into his other hand, watching the winter wind pull at their petals, and tugs the collar of his jacket up until it brushes his chin in a parody of provided warmth.

They will live a short life out here—surrender to the bitter chill within a matter of days—but for now they are vibrant and alive, and he lays them carefully across the pristine marble headstone. It looks too clean, too polished and _new, _and he hates it—almost scuffs it up with his shoes just to remind himself of the passage of time and the steady forward progression of days that means he's healing, shard by tiny, agonizing shard, but restrains himself because it will make her family angry.

He pauses to think about that for a moment and then kicks dirt on the grave, next to the flowers and over the date of death, grinding it in with his heel just to spite them, just to make her smile and shake her head and roll her eyes.

Wherever she is.

Tears are pricking at the corners of his eyes, but he's too proud and stupidly stubborn to let them fall. Instead, he hurriedly runs his sleeve across his face, eradicating them. It hurts, somewhere deep inside that all the healing in the world hasn't been able to reach yet, and even though he's piecing himself back together, he's still jagged-edge and cracked.

But it's easier to breathe.

* * *

"**Between you and I, you and me and the satellites. I never believed you."**

**

* * *

**

_**One day after**_

He shut the door in their faces hard enough to nearly break the hinges off and it barely holds him up as he slumps against it. He can hear them angrily pounding against the flimsy wooden surface, demanding to know his role in this mess, but they sound far away—in a world that dropped out from beneath him like a forming black hole when they stoically informed him that she was _gone. _

He slides down the door and buries his face in his arms. She's _gone, _and he never … not _once … _and why didn't he…? The thoughts won't form themselves around the deep, unreachable part of him that's screaming frantically.

It takes a moment, a half second of listening in wide-eyed shock before it forms words, a word over and over and over again like a broken record:

—why, why, why, _why, _whywhywhy_**why—**_

With tears and gut-wrenching sobs and shaking, blindsided disbelief, he shatters against the front door.

* * *

"**Before all this, what'd I miss?"**

**

* * *

**

_**One month before**_

She never was very good at living.

She stuttered and tripped constantly over half-formed words like she never quite knew what to say or how to say it, or changed her mind constantly half-way through. She shuffled her feet and was always fascinated by the ground instead of people's faces, and avoided adventure, surprise, or human interaction in general like the plague.

Her grades at school were passable, but entirely unremarkable in the same way her presence in the classroom always ways—hindered by her fear of raising her hand and her tendency to curl up in her desk until her teachers stopped remembering she existed. It was shameful behavior, people whispered when they thought she was out of earshot, or maybe just within it, to be the heiress to one of the greatest fortunes in the country and be outmatched and outclassed at everything by her younger, wisp of a sister.

She didn't know how to dream, or set a goal in her mind and then _fight _toward it with every scrap of her being, or set a bar high enough that she had to jump to reach it.

But what most of them didn't know was that her smile was brighter than the sun, and it lit up her eyes like diamonds. And that was cheesy and corny and probably the start of the worst pick-up line in the history of mankind, but it was true, and he prided himself on being honest.

She didn't chatter uselessly on about nothing, and when she managed to get words out around her doubt and low self-esteem and fear they were full of maturity well beyond her age. She never tried to be something she wasn't, and when he sat down next to her at lunch one afternoon, he had no idea that that day—that hovering moment of indecision before he made his move—had been a crossroads that would throw his life onto a completely different path than he had so meticulously (_obsessively) _laid out for himself.

He helped her figure out how to laugh, and not trip over herself all the time, and the right way to meet someone's eyes without letting fear eat you alive over what you might find looking back, and she helped him remember that he had a decent smile and that life wasn't all about goals thinly masqueraded as obsessions and that little things like the patterns of the clouds against a blue backdrop of endless sky had the power to steal the air out of his lungs.

Things got amazing, after that.

But somewhere down the road of that new direction, her smile began to fall short of her eyes, and her laughter rang a few notes shy of hollow, and he _never—_

* * *

"**Do you ever get homesick?"**

**

* * *

**

_**One week after **_

He realizes that when she was tripping over her words again in those last few months, and smiling when she thought he wasn't looking with tragedy-tinted eyes, she was saying _good-bye_, and _I'm sorry _and _I can't…_

_

* * *

_

"**I can't get used to it. I'll never get used to it."**

**

* * *

**

_**Three months after**_

He brings two lunches to school every day without even realizing, setting them carefully in their spot on the wall. He arranges the chopsticks on top of hers and he can almost see her there, picking at the meal with delicate fingers and insisting in the always polite way of hers that since he is one of the only people alive capable of burning _water _she will be cooking next time.

It's easy to ignore the fact that there will never been a next time. He's gotten pathetically talented at playing pretend.

It isn't until he notices the sympathetic looks—canted quickly at him when they think he's looking at the other way—that he understands how certifiably insane he looks, bringing lunch for a ghost every day. Naruto's eyes are red and puffy for weeks and Sakura's grown soft around the edges with overbearing sympathy while people who have never acknowledged her existence before suddenly have a thousand meaningless, self-help phrases like "_I'm so sorry for your loss" _and "_I can't believe she—" _and _"How could we have missed—"_ and "_You'll be okay." _

It's suffocating and annoying and he wants to scream and curse at them until he is blue in the face so he doesn't have to scream and curse at her like he _really _wants to, and no matter how many people express their sympathy and concern and advice for moving on, he still brings two lunches to school.

He can't stop. It's a reflex, like trying to breathe even when suffocating, knee-jerk and so ingrained he doesn't think about it—won't, _can't _because that would mean acknowledging what happened, what she _did, _and that it's permanent and irreversible and all the strength and will-power in the world won't bring her back from the place she's gone.

So he keeps packing the lunches and glares death threats and daggers at anyone who tries to get him to stop, and it doesn't ease the ache, doesn't heal him at all, but he isn't sure he cares anymore.

Somewhere along the twisted way, the looks become amusing instead of gut-wrenching and agony-inducing, and he doesn't know if he's stepped forward or back.

* * *

"**I'm under that night. I'm under those same stars. You and me in a red car."**

**

* * *

**

_**One week before**_

It's beautiful out here, nice to get out of the city for a change. I haven't seen the stars in ages. Thanks, Hinata.

Y-you're w-w-welcome.

Hn. You're stuttering again. I thought you were over that.

M-mostly. Ne, Sasuke-kun, c-can I ask you a question?

Sure.

H-how would you want to die?

That's a little morbid, coming from you.

I'm j-just wondering. How w-would you w-want to die?

Brilliantly. In motion. Doing something purposeful, like … saving someone. I don't know, I haven't thought about it in awhile. It's … not something that's good to dwell on too much.

R-right. S-s-sorry.

Hn. It's alright.

S-sometimes I wonder what it's like to be a star. They always l-look so beautiful. I b-bet no one ever cri-criticizes the stars.

They seem sad to me. Always so distant and untouchable. Cold. And they're always dying.

E-everything is always d-dying.

Maybe. But I prefer the sun to them.

W-why?

The sun is warm.

O-oh. E-even th-though it burns?

I would rather burn than freeze. There's more … life in it.

E-even the sun burns out, you know…

I know, but it takes lifetimes. I think … that's the best way to remembered. Dying in a way that takes lifetimes to be forgotten. That way, you never really die.

Like a l-legend?

Yeah. Like that.

I-I don't know. I think … I would r-rather be remembered as a p-person.

A person?

Y-yeah. Not an icon, o-or a myth, or something untouchable. Just … a _person. _T-that way your d-death doesn't take the place of your l-life.

Hn. Maybe. How about we change the subject? I've had enough talk about death.

R-right. S-s-sorry.

With a quiet sigh—a feeble exhalation of air that folds in on itself like origami paper—something ends.

* * *

"**You asleep at my side. Going in and out of the headlights."**

**

* * *

**

_**One day before **_

The book is old and worn in his hands as he carefully turns it over, running his fingers along the ridged spine and the title emblazoned across in slightly faded gold.

He looks up at her curiously, wondering if she somehow forgot that his birthday wasn't until July. "_Les Miserables?" _

She twirls a long strand of dark hair around her finger. "I th-thought you might like it. I k-know you like classics."

He smiles at her—careful to soften the usually sharp edges because he can see how nervous she is, practically fidgeting in front of him like a child forced to speak in front of the judgmental faces of their peers for the first time.

"Thank you. It's nice."

She nods quickly, and turns to race the setting sun home, but a moment of indecision makes her pause and when she looks back at him something indefinable is lurking in her gaze. "W-when you read it, w-will you promise to look at it closely and r-remember me?"

It's a strange thing to ask, but he is willing to give anything to erase the shadows from her eyes so he smiles again—tries to make it bright and sun-filled. "Sure."

She smiles back—a strange half-lift of her mouth that he has never seen before. "Good-bye, Sasuke-kun." And then she's walking away, the sunset painting colors across her back.

He watches her turn the corner before going home and placing the book on the shelf with the others he's collected over the years.

He'll read it. Someday.

* * *

"**Could I have saved you? Would that have betrayed you?"**

**

* * *

**

_**Three weeks after **_

He throws the picture of them they took in a photobooth last year against the wall with brutal finality—watching it shatter against the floor like he did and it's some kind of twisted poetic justice—when he realizes how much of a _hypocrite _she was. Not letting your death overshadow your life—it was a joke, a warm and fuzzy generalization meant as a reassurance, because _no one _thinks of her anymore and remembers the way she _lived. _

No one even saw when she lived, and maybe, if he can bring himself to face it and admit to it, that's the reason she chose to die the way she did. In the blackened aftermath, though, the _whys _fade away, burned aside by the acidic, inescapable fact that she _chose to die. _And beneath that, lurking in the shadows he cannot conquer, is that his presence—that new and amazing world that threw it's door open within minutes of sitting next to her—wasn't strong enough to anchor her, to make her want to struggle through the mess of life to something greater.

He hates her, then, in that black moment.

But it fades quickly beneath the weight of the emptiness and when he sinks to floor beside the remnants of the picture, there are none of the tears he shed for his parents or the bitter curses he hurled at his brother when he lay alone in the dark. He is used up and spent and there is nothing left but fractures in the glass and a vast plain of empty ice.

The childish part of him that still has enough feeling left to shoulder some of the suffocating grief lurking in the corners of his mind next to the blood, asks if he could have saved her. Why he didn't even _see… _

He focuses on the question because as much as it stirs up the ache in his chest that feels like his ribs are cracking and breaking it is easier to handle than the overwhelming emptiness and the numbing cold that always comes from standing alone on the ice watching the fissures widen. He unspools their time together in a long filmstrip of memories, freezes some and holds them up to the light, criticizing and analyzing and _desperate, _in search of a day, a moment, a _split-second _where something could have changed.

He finds nothing.

Alone in the silence, he can't help but think that if something _had _managed to change and there had been life and brittle hope and carrying on, she would have resented him for it.

* * *

"**I want to burn this film. You alone with those pills."**

**

* * *

**

_**Two days after **_

It's dark in the house. No one is home and the silence is suffocating and tense, full of uncertainty and razor-edged with fear. She perches on the edge of her bed—a tiny bottle clutched to her chest, pilfered from the medicine cabinet in her father's bathroom, and stealing them is the boldest move she's made in her life. The moon streaming in through the window, pushing its way past the glass and the curtains, rings her hair in a brilliant halo and fills her eyes with something ethereal.

She empties the bottle into her hand and the pills look like snowflakes littering her palm. She brings her hand to up to her mouth, swallowing everything in one violent, jerky motion.

Her shoulders slump forward as she sways in place, clutching her stomach and the bottle in white-knuckled hands. Everything about her is pale and ghost-like and she's fading like snow melted by the heat of the spring sun. Then she topples forward off the bed to the floor in a graceless tangle of limbs, and suddenly she's a marionette with all her strings cut.

Lifeless.

He wakes up with a scream, hands clawing at the empty space above his bed as if he could catch her and somehow force air back into her lungs.

* * *

"**What you couldn't do, I will. I forgive you."**

**

* * *

**

_**Five months after **_

He cleans for the first time in weeks, and battling the layers of dust that have built up on his bookshelf is such a normal thing that he feels closer to being alive than he has in months.

How, why, he doesn't know, but he's carrying on.

Then his fingertips brush against a careworn, gold-laced spine. He blinks in surprise, bending to peer at the title hidden by the shadows on the second shelf, and his eyes blow wide in shock as he sees _Les Miserables _peeking out from behind his spread fingers. He wrenches the book off the shelf so violently that a handful of others tumble to the floor in a cacophony of noise and dust clouds.

Oblivious, he sinks to the floor in the midst of the mess, all but sitting on _A Tale of Two Cities _with _The Count of Monte Cristo _digging into the back of his left knee and _For Whom the Bell Tolls _nudging his side and elbow. He pulls open the book in start-stop, stilted motion, flipping through the pages with trembling hands and roving eyes as her words, her _last _words, to him clang around in his head.

Page 365. Upper right-hand corner. Unmistakable flowing script from dozens of calligraphy lessons.

_"I'm sorry." _

Everything jerks and shudders and _stops.

* * *

_

"**I'll forgive you."**

**

* * *

**

_**Five months, one day after. **_

In his bedroom that night with the book opened to page 365 clenched in his bleached-white death grip, he stares at the only suicide note she'd written—woefully inadequate and shatteringly heartfelt—watching his first tears in five months splatter in fat drops against the yellowed paper, and forgives her.

* * *

"**For blue, blue skies. For blue, blue skies."**

**

* * *

**

_**Nine months after **_

He stands out in the warm summer rain and feels the earth wet beneath his bare feet as he tilts his face up to the sky, unheeding of the drops dashing themselves against his skin and clinging to his clothes with stubborn tenacity.

It feels healing and cleansing and erasing, and through the sheen of water he can almost see her, twirling like she used to in her carefree moments—her purple dress following her like a billowing fan as she throws her arms out and drinks in the life she didn't love enough.

He laughs and it blindsides him for a moment, but it feels warm and soothing as it rumbles through his chest, glossing over the spot where the ache still thrums with temporarily healing hands. He lets it work and spins once, stupidly, full of abandon—just for her, for being able to remember her without the darkness, the pain, the whywhy_why__**why—**_

Remember her as she _lived. _

Finally, _finally_, for a breath, for a moment, he is alive.

* * *

"**For blue, blue skies. For blue…"**

**

* * *

**

_**One year after**_

He puts his hands in pockets and tilts his face up to take in the blue-sky afternoon. The sunlight is a warm caress—calloused and gentle like the palm of her hand.

He smiles and pivots on one steady heel, ambling his way toward the cemetery gate with the unhurried, lingering step of those knowing they no longer have to hover near a grave waiting for meaning to emerge from the marble name.

Behind him, the lilacs flutter their small petals in gentle good-bye.

_fin._


End file.
